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Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist (2012)
- jobigoud 7y agoI often wonder where we would be if the Earth was the size of Jupiter. Or if life started on the Moon instead of Earth.
- steve76 7y agoCan finite physics exist with uncertainty?
- orasis 7y agoExponential growth can continue in virtual realities as the physical reality maxes out.
- incompatible 7y agoThis assumes that the virtual realities are constructed in a proprietary model with consumers and producers. Actually, everybody would have to be both, otherwise the system would grind to a halt with consumers unable to raise funds to purchase products. But information doesn't need to be rationed in that way: what happens if people join an open source virtual reality instead, where consumption is unlimited and production is voluntary? Nothing in this world would be part of the economy as economists measure it.
- kreldjarn 7y agoDid you read the piece? They talk about VR.
- Ancalagon 7y agoActually, they dismissed it pretty quickly I thought.
- jbay808 7y agoI believe the "dismissal" is this cogent argument: Shuffling bits around takes energy; if your virtual reality services grow exponentially and energy production doesn't, then the price of energy must also increase exponentially or else one of your VR companies could buy all the energy and shut down the competition. Energy production (and computation) are limited by the capacity of the earth to vent heat into space at a reasonable surface temperature. So unless you allow for an exponentially expanding real-world physical economy, you can't have an exponentially growing virtual economy.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoThe price of energy is capped at the cost to privately produce it for yourself, which is probably pretty low in the scheme of all encompassing virtual real estate fiscal gods.
- orasis 7y ago1 additional bit of information allows exponentially more complexity to exist. Digital scales very very well.
- heraclius 7y agoThere are energetic constraints on the processing of information that eventually become relevant, though far beyond limits sans virtualisation.
- rini17 7y agoOr perhaps the capability of humans to actually have so many economical transactions will max out first, no matter what virtual reality.
- seiferteric 7y agoOnly complaint is the discussion about super computers consuming vast amounts of power. I do think there is still room for many more doublings in efficiency for computers, it will likely require a switch to a completely new technology though. Also a bit more wild speculation... He does not account for the idea of space based manufacturing (he just mentions living in space). It's at least conceivable we could one day have almost everything made in space (even food) and air dropped to us periodically. Wouldn't this bypass his main argument? We could even have space based energy production, beamed down to earth via laser. There would still be waste heat of the energy consumed, but you would eliminate the waste heat of the actual energy production (he sited ~30% efficiency for power plants, so 70% waste heat).
- jbay808 7y ago"I do think there is still room for many more doublings in efficiency for computers" I don't think our finite physicist is arguing that exponential growth can't happen temporarily, just that eventually we hit the boundaries of our petri dish. It's a challenge to economic models that sometimes deny in principle that the petri dish even has boundaries.
- phkahler 7y agoWhere does one get material for space based manufacturing?
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- heraclius 7y agoIt’s not clear how meaningful these measurements are anyway. Consider two years: in the first, 1000 tonnes of wheat are produced, and in the second, 500 tonnes of wheat and 300 of steel. Which year, one asks, is more productive? We can measure everything in wheat-equivalent or steel-equivalent or (commodity-basket)-equivalent (i.e. PPP) but ultimately such calculations are just as arbitrary as reduction to wheat bushels (or carpet kilometres or whatever.) Incommensurability therefore seems to make all this fairly meaningless.
- jbay808 7y agoThis is why, as all economists agree, measurements of economic growth are completely arbitrary and the economy hasn't changed in any meaningful way that can be called "growth" since the middle ages. ... Oh, wait, or maybe growth actually can be expressed as a quantifiable concept? In this case, the author chooses energy as an objective measurement, because all economic transactions must consume energy in order to occur.
- heraclius 7y agoBut as is pointed out, energy isn’t, because efficiency exists. I am not denying that the economy has changed in meaningful ways; I am merely denying that we can quantify the overall state of the economy over time such as to enable simple comparisons implicit in concepts like “growth”—and that with the caveat that the problem isn’t too severe over short periods of time.
- jhpriestley 7y agoAt least one pretty well-known economist does echo heraclius' point: "The fact that two incommensurable collections of miscellaneous objects cannot in themselves provide the material for a quantitative analysis need not, of course, prevent us from making approximate statistical comparisons, depending on some broad element of judgment rather than of strict calculation, which may possess significance and validity within certain limits. But the proper place for such things as net real output and the general level of prices lies within the field of historical and statistical description, and their purpose should be to satisfy historical or social curiosity, a purpose for which perfect precision — such as our causal analysis requires, whether or not our knowledge of the actual values of the relevant quantities is complete or exact — is neither usual nor necessary. To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth — a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis." (J.M. Keynes)
- pmalynin 7y agoI think the dismissal of space colonization over a period of 400 years is...unreasonable. We could move all production to Mars for example and only consume the shipped resources. Sure that’s one doubling right there, but we could continue this process.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoMars does look a lot closer in 2019 than it did in 2012. Back then it seemed like no real plan existed, except for one little company not a lot of folks believed in. Now we’ve got billionaires in a space race and suddenly it seems obvious that we’ll colonize space to some degree even in the next 100 years, likely with some aggressive growth. We’ve only recently come off the gloomy decades after Apollo where space exploration was so muted compared to the glory days.
- jammygit 7y agoThe biotech to terraform (or live under domes sustainably) is a longer ways off though. All the attempts to create biodomes I’ve read about have either failed or cheated on a large scale. Unless we have an Asimov-esque robot driven “colonization”, but does that fully count?
- Mirioron 7y agoYou mean caves instead of domes, right? You need protection against radiation and rock provides a lot more of that.
- rotexo 7y agoI think the parent was talking about all of the ecosystem services we take for granted on Earth that we still don’t know that we can reproduce artificially. The fires in California this past fall? That represented a lot going wrong, but you could still go outside in the Bay Area and breathe. On Mars or in space? Everything goes perfectly except for one little thing, and you are dead instantaneously.
- evdev 7y agoAm I missing something, or hasn't energy per capita in the developed world already stopped growing? As well as population growth in rich societies?
- jbotz 7y agoEnergy consumption has not stopped growing in rich societies... so long as the economy grows, energy consumption grows. The relationship isn't perfectly linear only because the available metrics are imperfect, but if you have any data that outright contradicts this rather reasonable assupmtion, please show us.
- azernik 7y agoMoney (and hence economic size) is an arbitrary measure of "value" that does not necessarily correlate with energy consumption.
- evdev 7y agohttps://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:USA:CHN:CAN&hl=en&dl=en#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:USA:CHN:CAN&ifdim=region&tstart=-302731200000&tend=1432872000000&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
- jbotz 7y agoHuh, I sure put my foot in my mouth on that one... a rather big assumption I never checked. Recalibrating... But in my defense it's worth mentioning that globally it still seems to hold true. The fact that energy consumption stopped in rich countries is apparently mostly due to the fact that manufacturing, which is one of the most energy-intensive parts of the economy, moved to poorer countries. But since the rich countries consume those manufactured products, the energy use should be counted against them too!
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- scythe 7y agoTom Murphy's website occasionally comes up in futurist circles. His general point that unbounded exponential growth is impossible is obviously correct, but I find his condescending attitude tiresome and he often exaggerates the apparent validity of his pessimism through questionable arguments. For example, he first insists that the conversation about energy consumption be confined to Earth and ignore space exploration, which is reasonably sensible because of the large energy cost of space travel. He moves from there to a thermodynamic bound on energy dissipation from Earth into space via black-body radiation. This argument is self-contradictory: if we were producing so much energy that it were able to heat the atmosphere (>1000x today), we would certainly have enough energy to fly into space. (The linked article "Why not space?" contains no math and few real arguments: https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/why-not-space/ ) Also, this paragraph is relatively good evidence he didn't talk to a real economist: >But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt. Food would stop arriving at the plate without energy for purchase, so people would pay attention to this. Someone would be willing to pay more for it. Everyone would. There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. None of this hemming and hawing about infinity answers the real question: is it possible for the global economy to grow until nobody has to live in mud-huts without air conditioning? The answer is almost certainly yes.
- jbay808 7y agoI agree that the tone of straw-manning an economist who may or may not exist, but either way cannot elaborate upon or defend their own arguments, is pretty distasteful. That said, I think you misunderstood the point of dismissing space colonization. That was done to examine the consequences of that assumption, not as an assertion that space colonization can't be economical. Many people might think exponential growth can continue even without expanding into space, and trying to dispute this opinion without first drawing a line would just result in confusion as the discussion retreats into "but we'll just expand into space then!". None of this hemming and hawing about infinity answers the real question... In what world was that the real question? The one where limits to growth are a broadly accepted fact acknowledged by politicians, economists, and business leaders?
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- philipkglass 7y agoI generally liked the Do The Math posts but I thought this was one of the weakest. Physicist: "Right, if you plot the U.S. energy consumption in all forms from 1650 until now, you see a phenomenally faithful exponential at about 3% per year over that whole span." It's not phenomenally faithful. There's an inflection point visible even in his large graph going back all the way to 1650. US primary energy consumption in 1977 was 78 quadrillion BTU (quads). At 2.9% annual growth it would have risen to 245 quads by 2017. Actual US primary energy consumption in 2017 was only 98 quads. The per capita primary energy consumption in the US was actually higher in 1977. Physicists don't need to imagine future limits to growth. The limits are already visible in the historical record. But, contra the fears of many scientists circa 1960, the limits to growth showed up on the demand side before the supply side. We ended up with a world where widespread obesity is a problem and predicted gigadeaths from starvation did not actually happen. For any product you can imagine consuming, there are "obesity"-type limits to how much more of that same product you can consume before the marginal utility goes negative. For any service you might use, similar limits apply since there are only 24 hours in a day. The physicist character gives the more correct answer but his supporting evidence is flawed. The economist has the much worse answers, but only (I suspect) because he's a strawman constructed for didactic purposes. Economists generally don't make 1400 year forecasts of any sort.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- msla 7y ago> But, contra the fears of many scientists circa 1960, the limits to growth showed up on the demand side before the supply side. We ended up with a world where widespread obesity is a problem and predicted gigadeaths from starvation did not actually happen. And I think some people were... "disappointed", for lack of a better word, that this happened. That their fantasies of global collapse Soylent Green-style didn't pan out, that the lackadaisical masses who had the temerity to not give up all modern advances weren't punished by the Dread God Malthus. Call it Puritanical Luddism, call it Apocalyptic Deep Green, call it a dogmatic insistence that any system not under totalitarian control must collapse.
- jammygit 7y agoI just want to say that this discussion is a charming read so far (the salad just arrived - I can’t wait!)
- Chathamization 7y ago> per-capita energy use has surged dramatically over time Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. > But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt...There will be a floor to how low energy prices can go as a fraction of GDP. That seems to be a bizarre understanding of how the economy works. Advances in efficiency or energy production aren't going to be stopped at some point because people are worried about someone buying up all the energy. You're not going to get an inventor to say, "Hey, this new product would be too efficient, I'm not going to introduce it to the market because then energy is going to get so cheap that someone will buy it all up." And someone could already try committing energy blackmail now if they really wanted. Pepco powers Washington, D.C. and parts of Maryland, and Exelon bought them for $6.8 billion. Some one, or a group of people could pay that and try to blackmail the government. Of course, they wouldn't get anything for it but a quick trip to prison. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...
- Gibbon1 7y ago> Per capita energy use seems to be declining in advanced economies[1]. Yeah we moved a bunch of heavy industry to China and switched to low carbon finance.
- jbay808 7y agoI think we'd need to look globally, because it's easy to outsource your energy intensive activities. If I buy my bread from a baker, I can say I don't need any energy to run an oven anymore, but that doesn't imply that when the baker gets as wealthy as I am the world won't need ovens anymore.
- philipkglass 7y agoChathamization linked to a graph of energy use per capita in the US, showing that it peaked in the 1970s. In 2015 it was 6804 kgoe per capita, well below the peak of 8438 kgoe recorded in 1978. CO2 emissions are a decent proxy for primary energy in our present fossil-dominated era, and when accounting for CO2 embodied in imports, the US does look worse. But it doesn't make a big difference: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-importers-exporters https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-worlds-largest-co2-import... "Despite the large total of CO2 imports and exports, US emissions are only 6% higher and Chinese emissions are 13% lower when CO2 transfers are taken into account." If the energy/CO2 really should be increased 6% to account for imports, that would put American energy consumption at 6804 * 1.06 = 7212 kgoe per capita in 2015, still lower than in the 1970s.
- age_bronze 7y agoThere's an underlying assumption that economical growth has anything to do with physical limits. Economical growth is a lie we tell ourselves so that innovation has its incentives, while everything else that's there because it must be there (because it will always have a demand), such as energy (but also food, real estate, etc.) just piggybacks with a similar 'fake growth' that really arises only from the fact these things are just as valuable as before. The threat for the lack of supply is just enough to keep businesses that can't really 'grow' still grow. It will still be exponential growth so long as the leading innovation companies are growing and everyone else is just corrected for inflation.
- lutorm 7y agoYeah, as far as I understand, there's nothing preventing you and me just trading the same money back and forth at ever increasing speed, creating economic "growth" without physical limits.
- sbov 7y agoTaxes.
- drdeca 7y agoThere are physical limits on how fast you can do that. Bremermann's limit, (or some extension of it?), says that the minimum amount of time needed for a system with average energy E to change to an orthogonal state, is inversely proportional to E (specifically, pi * h_bar, all divided by 2E ). So, assuming that “I have the money” and “you have the money” are orthogonal (collections of) states, then there is a maximum rate at which the system can switch between those states. You might say “well, what if we just count the number of transactions that ‘should’ have happened, instead of counting the number of actual events where the money changes hands”, but that seems to obviously not reflect actual benefit? If me and another person turn away from you, and then turn back, and claim that we exchanged ownership of a dollar bill I’m holding 2^64 times while we were facing away from you, the obvious response would be “no, you didn’t.”.
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- cerealbad 7y agoisn't the universe expanding at an accelerating rate? if the problem is excess planetary heat, you can use thermosynthesis to accelerate novel thermogenesis in pseudo-living species - imagine endothermic sea sponges cooling the oceans and helping to repopulate at risk ocean animals. "this thing humans do cannot continue" is a weak argument. everything humans do is some expression of the natural state of conditions in their immediate environment, technology is just another convolutional cycle on top of the pre-existing ones, squeezing more efficiency from the raw resources existing there. the planet is not in balance, and ecosystems are not fixed. things are in a state of glacial flux with periods of extreme instability due to various cycle renewals - volcanic, tectonic, asteroid/comet impactor, solar, geomagnetic symmetry breaking, viral. 'man made causes' are a misnomer, they are just accelerated selection events, man happens to be a global selector for almost all living things, and man activity on the planet can be a mass extinction event due to many scaling factors, the most obvious one being the technology cycle mentioned previously, the efficiency it provides can be simplified to 'making more heat'. it's easy to fall prey to goldilocks thinking - due to limited information and the tyranny of the present. try to think in terms beyond a human lifespan. look at the progress achieved in the past 300 years. if we wanted to we could spend the next 300 years returning earth back to a pre industrial epoch and wipe from the surface of the planet all traces of the modern advanced civilization we created, not by a cataclysm or destructive war but by planned intentional decolonisation. given that its possible and very likely to happen (perhaps a catalyst is required, like a new global religion) over the past 300k-1my this maybe happened multiple times. humans are still here in some form or another and they will continue to be here into the foreseeable future x10 my's, because they have shown capable of surviving (milankovitch scales, 100k, 41k, 23k years). technology is dominant and makes the smartest humans think in brittle ways. the people shaping rocks for millennia were not stupid, they were just incapable of thinking beyond their stone paradigm. pretend to be a godlike alien silently watching the world from the largrangian point in the earth-moon system. millions and billions of years go by. once life begins on earth it continues into the present, the idea that humans, in the next few thousand years, will somehow pose an unconscious risk to a process that has survived and morphed for billions of years is a misreading of the story. what COULD happen is another mass selection event, where a human bottleneck eliminates 99.9% of all living things. that happened before and it's part of some larger cycle that humans are necessarily a part of (as living things) and what is considered causal could also be simply an expression of a deeper reason for living things to exist - to out compete other living things and monopolize the space available to them. is the physicist a finitist? seems like he substituted growth which is the economists mantra, for change which is his. predicting the future is a waste of time, as an agent in the world you will either cause the future or be slave to it despite your best efforts either way. if it is knowable it will be unchangeable, given all your free actions will lead to the known outcome. it is clearly unknowable and therefore ununchangeable - since the capacity to measure any deviation or change does not exist. what will occur is as likely to occur or not occur had you participated or not. my pet theory is that any time you see people attempting a cross-disciplinary leap of faith their parachute often fails to open. good 20th century examples being james watson and william shockley - both making the tempting leap from (bio)electrical systems to socio-communication ones, leading to self-embarrassment. the only interesting problem for the 21st century is how do you transform knowledge from one domain to another and retain it, the only way humans will survive their own extinction without reverting back to barbaric primitivism is to plasticize expertise and mass produce it.
- acchow 7y agoAbsolutely there are thermodynamic limits to energy "use" on the planet. But isn't it obvious that we will expand into space stations and then eventually onto other planets? > But if energy became arbitrarily cheap, someone could buy all of it, and suddenly the activities that comprise the economy would grind to a halt. This segment contained a number of logical leaps that I can't agree with. It is possible for energy cost to fall arbitrarily low without reaching zero. And you can imagine an arbitrarily low price that would skyrocket quickly if someone actually tried to buy all the energy. > So once our fixed annual energy costs 1% of GDP, the 99% remaining will find itself stuck. If it tries to grow, energy prices must grow in proportion and we have monetary inflation, but no real growth. I'm not able to follow the claim here. Can anyone shed some light?
- dosy 7y agoI think it's a condensed version of saying: If we have finite energy at a fixed price (of say 1% of GDP in total cost), then either the rest of the GDP (which is not energy) does not grow, and so the demand for that energy (and so its price) remains the same, or it tries to grow (and cannot "is stuck") because growth will increase demand for the energy and therefore drive up prices, but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth.
- acchow 7y ago> but since it is energy and fundamental to everything, all prices will go up, so we will have inflation, but inflation is not growth. Oh ok... I see why I got lost. In my head I didn't hold the assumption that "all growth necessarily must consume more energy". This is assumed throughout the article until the Epilogue. But if you drop this assumption, then I don't think the "it's just inflation not growth" holds anymore.
- dosy 7y agoI had to parse that part a few times to get it myself, when I saw you didn't get it too I could relate. Then I had to think a few times about what you gave in response! It seems this part of the topic is quite involved. I think I get some of it now. If you drop the assumption that grow takes energy, then no extra demand on energy from growth, then no price increase on energy, then no inflation, and so it's just growth, not inflation. Agreed. But when you and me are examining it like this...the whole situation described by that sentence starts to seem a little contrived to me. Seems there's a lot of error bars on each of the assumed connections in that causal chain, that could lead that path to branch at each of them into many other possible paths, rather than just the one path that condensed sentence proposes. I still have a hard time imagining a growth that doesn't use more energy (except the one defined in that article as "development", which seems to be a more sophisticated/involved use of existing resources, rather than extracting/creating more new (primary) resources.) If you could elaborate some more on your images of growth that don't consume more energy, I'd find it helpful to understand this whole thing better.
- ericdykstra 7y agoThis reminds me of the Limits to Growth graph, popularized by #GraphTwitter https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7LCSEDWwAE5_Ar.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7LCSEDWwAE5_Ar.jpg
- Glyptodon 7y agoWater seems more interesting than energy as a bound. If energy gets as cheap as breathable air is now due to some sort of long running series of changes and improvements cornering the market would be like trying to bag the whole atmosphere and then charge people for it. The cheapest things are the most impossible to corner. Not that I have any idea whether some sort of ability to do more with less can bound energy use below some arbitrary output threshold.
- jeremysalwen 7y agoI read through the comments expecting the typical HN takedown of the whole bogus idea that energy must become cheaper as a fraction of the economy in order for it to keep growing. But surprisingly, nobody more economically literate than me has done so, so I guess it falls on me. We already have experience with an economic input which is required for practically all production becoming less important to the economy as efficiency increases, it's called labor. And as efficiency of labor usage increases, the price of labor goes up, not down, see Baumol's Cost Disease. So no, the fact that the price of energy will go up with gdp does not mean the growth is "illusory", and the fact that an "extremely prestigious" econ professor did not point this out is a bit fishy.
- jbay808 7y agoI'm not sure this is quite a takedown of the author's point. In fact, I'm surprised at how many people on HN seem to be misunderstanding this. The author is saying that physics puts a fairly solid cap on the amount of power we can produce on earth. That's the basic point. What does a finite energy-consuming, exponentially growing economy look like? If we accept that all economic transactions consume some energy, and the economy is growing (so the number or the value of economic transactions is increasing), then once we've hit our physical constraint on power generation, how does growth continue? Only if the energy required per unit of transaction-value continually decreases. So the price of energy must continue to drop, measured by the relative to the value it provides. The author then points out that this is a contradiction because the price of energy would have to rise, and therefore that the problem is in the assumption of continuing exponential growth.
- jasonhansel 7y agoEven if there is some limit to economic growth in the distant future, is that necessarily a bad thing? It might be that, by the time we reach this limit, society would be so prosperous that we would see no reason to exceed it.
- drdeca 7y agoThis seems possible, yes, though if it is the case, I think we ought to prepare for that eventuality somewhat ahead of time, so that we don’t encounter a nasty shock when the time comes.
- Amboto2205 7y agoDoesn’t the definition of a “steady-state” economy mean that there will be no real GDP growth, but only nominal growth? I don’t understand the assertion that GDP can grow indefinitely just because the arbitary “utility” can. There will still be physical limits inside a steady-state which would be subjected to price, which will affect GDP.
- Swivekth18 7y agoIt is possible to grow economically within a constrained energy budget, as the lever metaphor suggests. With efficiency, it is even possible to double the population… But I find it very hard to believe in a continued economic growth simultaneously with a declining energy budget, especially when the economic aspect is facing a cliff of massive debt. The only way out is good ole industrialism on a massive scale in such a scientific way to keep cooking dinner and not spoil the garden.
- PaulAJ 7y agoThe basic fallacy here is the proposition that all economic activity involves physical work, and hence energy == economic activity. However this is not the case. My economic activity consists of staring at a screen and pressing buttons. It is therefore perfectly possible that energy consumption can level off while economic growth continues. One can imagine a similar conversation between a geographer and an economist (if one existed) in 1700 in which the geographer made the same argument about land use; at the time economic growth was very much about bringing land under cultivation or other use, and hence (the geographer would argue) economic growth would be limited by the finite amount of land. Same fallacy.
- paraschopra 7y agoI think you're missing the basic point. Yes, pressing buttons and staring at a screen takes less energy but the value corresponding to that is expected to grow indefinitely, is that even possible? What humans value is built upon energy and resources (even clicking on buttons), and if that base is limited, where does future value creation come from?
- fallingfrog 7y agoPressing buttons is physical work, unless you're doing it via astral projection.
- dane-pgp 7y agoBut to create 10 times as much value, you don't have to necessarily press buttons 10 times faster or 10 times harder. It's possible that by pressing the same number of buttons per year (i.e. the same number of programmer hours worked), the current generation of software in the world could be upgraded to a new, more valuable generation of software. There's a question of whether new software (presumably with extra features) necessarily uses more energy (per user, per year), but it seems possible that one year's more-valuable-software could be more energy-efficient than the previous year's less-valuable-software.
- sadness2 7y ago> thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves .. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space Huh? This seems to be a critical premise for establishing a crisis, yet it's incoherent and essentially imaginary. Ok, some ways we use energy have poor thermal efficiency. Light bulbs are the classic example, but look at the improvement from incandescent bulbs to LED's. Most uses of energy just move heat around within the environment, and if anything that would tend towards thermal equilibrium (a sort of microcosmic 'heat death'?), not "cooking".
- BlueTemplar 7y agoNo, it's basic thermodynamics : https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-developed-a-solar-panel-that-can-also-beam-heat-into-the-cold-void-of-space https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-developed-a-sol...
- xiphias2 7y agoThis is really cool, so there's a way to radiate heat to the space much more efficiently than the sun does, which destroys the argument of the physicist.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoI think you meant "much more efficiently than the Earth does" ? It weakens the argument... but I'm uncertain whether fatally or not. You still need to radiate exponentially increasing amounts of power to outer space ! This is going to mess with surface temperature sooner or later...
- mac01021 7y agoIs that true? My physics is admittedly not great. However I though a 100% efficient lightbulb generates just as much heat, but at the place where the photons land (walls, floor, etc) rather than at the bulb. I think basically any time we use energy, whether by running current through a lightbulb it by respiration after eating food, it ultimately ends up as heat.
- Stay_frostJebel 7y agoUltimately, this is a problem of semantics. Physics describes one objective reality that interacts with billions of subjective realities. Economics describes how billions of subjective realities interact to form one objective reality. The article has a few places where the physicist attempts to ascribe an intrinsic value to an item (say dessert types) independent of the supply and demand curves for that item. The whole concept of a demand curve is that everyone has their own value that they give to an item. The fact that some people do NOT value some particular lifestyle improvements does not affect econ in the slightest.
- challenger22 7y agoHas anyone done the math to determine what fraction of global warming is just from the steady-state relationship between heat production and radiation into space, regardless of changes in albedo? Always been curious about that one. i.e. In the same way that a computer runs hotter when consuming more wattage, how much has the Earth gotten hotter just because we are consuming more wattage lately?
- vbuwivbiu 7y agonot one mention of bitcoin in this discussion, which would seem to be the obvious connection between physics and economics
- fallingfrog 7y agoI just want to draw attention to something which we are glossing over, which is that saying economic growth has a very high limit and saying that it has no limit are very, very different claims. If the claim you're making is that it has no limit, then the counterargument is trivial: the universe is finite, it contains a finite capacity for information storage, therefore no matter how you define "economy" the answer you get will be a finite number. But, I still see a lot of people who won't even concede the point in the case of unlimited growth. That, to me, suggests that we are looking at a deeper phenomenon than can be resolved via logical arguments. Think about the responses that believers have when confronted with the argument that there is no god. That is not an argument they can confront objectively. They respond with anger, disgust, etc. You're not making a truth claim to them; you're attacking their happiness in the afterlife. You're suggesting that their grandparents have vanished into nothingness instead of being in heaven. No matter what the facts are, they can never accept such an argument. I get the exact same feeling from all of you arguing for infinite exponential growth. You're not reacting as if this is a truth claim; you're reacting like I'm trying to take away your happy future, in which everyone is fabulously wealthy and everything continuously improves, forever. Think about how it makes you feel to consider that economic and scientific growth may have a limit. Can you be certain that you are really objective on this topic?
- karmakaze 7y agoFlaws aside a fun read.. It's a set-up when we're talking about an indefinite time scale AND bounding the discussion to Earth. Also the 1400 year time scale seems absurd. If/when for instance we have continuing orders of magnitude efficiencies in quantum computing. The physicist is debating for the wrong side.
- lerno 7y agoIf we assume average value of GDP at t = g(t) Energy usage per point of GDP = f(t) Then we can obviously construct a hypothetical scenario: lim t->inf g(t) * f(t) = C This is obviously possible if one flips it over, making economic growth depend on the rate of which we reduce the energy cost for producing a dollar of GDP. This obviously means that production must be decoupled from the sheer AMOUNT of physical goods, as those are necessarily limited. To increase GDP, we do not need to increase the amount we produce but the value of what we produce. Sure, one way to increase GDP would be to produce two cars for the same resource use as one car would need. And that has limits. But if I can produce a rocket that can propel something to orbit with the resource use of a car, I’m am not only enabling more rockets being built, but also actively reduce the energy cost of one.